Strategies of Sex

Strategies of Sex includes verses by a physician-scientist member of the National Academy of Sciences that are a celebration of the diversity of arrangements (often bizarre) that ensure the propagation of species, from Anableps to surgeonfish. The result is somewhere between Cole Porter (bees do it) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (let me count the ways..) with a touch of Ogden Nash. Pudgy moorhens, hairy-legged fruit flies, doubly endowed four-eyed fish whatever turns you on they are all here, immortalized with grace and style. The inanities of Homo sapiens are treated elsewhere in the book, which concludes with several serious poems.